‘Your Ma’s a Hard Brexit’:

The Guardian, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Border

Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado

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On 29 March 2017, UK Prime Minister Theresa May triggered
Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which sets out the process whereby member
states may withdraw from the European Union (EU). That day, the front page of
the UK’s national daily newspaper The
Guardian was emblazoned with an image depicting an incomplete jigsaw puzzle
of ‘Europe’, which is now missing a large section of the northwest that has
come loose. It floats away somewhere lower down the page, into an abyss. In place
of this northwesterly bit there is a white space used as a text box, which proclaims:
‘TODAY BRITAIN STEPS INTO THE UNKNOWN.’[i]
[Fig. 1 below]

In Ireland, North and South, the
immediate response to this image on social media was twofold. Firstly, people
questioned why The Guardian names
‘Britain’ rather than ‘the United Kingdom’ as the polity exiting the EU, a
statement that omits Northern Ireland from the equation. Secondly, they
demanded to know why, in the picture, ‘Britain’ appears to include Cos. Leitrim,
Donegal, and Cavan – three counties located in the Republic of Ireland (the latter
two are in the province of Ulster). Apparently Co. Monaghan (also in the
province of Ulster) is allowed to stay in ‘Europe’, and it is left behind,
still connected to the Republic. Not only does this image conflate ‘Britain’
with ‘the United Kingdom’, it also visualises an inexplicable re-partitioning
of Ireland and a reabsorption of three of Northern Ireland’s sister counties
from the Republic into ‘Britain’.

The
Guardian declares itself a ‘centre-left’ publication; however, others
would argue that its politics are securely centrist – neither leaning one way
nor the other. Nevertheless, this picture indicates that its centre is potentially
Westminster. In this ‘map’, the national newspaper’s vision of Brexit appears
to align with that of the right-wing, neo-imperialist Brexiteers who engineered
this political crisis. As Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole points out in that very
same newspaper, Brexit is fuelled by an English nationalism which is
neoimperialist in its construction.[ii]
Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain in the EU; yet as UK territories they
are being dragged out of it (and the Single Market) against their will. Furthermore,
some right-wing Westminster MPs are encouraging the Republic of Ireland to do
the same in order to facilitate cross-border trade between the latter and
Northern Ireland. (See ‘Irexit’). On the other hand, the EU has promised that
in the event of Irish reunification, the entire island would remain safely within
the fold.

Once more, Northern Ireland finds
itself caught in the middle. Nearly twenty years after the signing of the Good
Friday/Belfast Agreement, which supposedly ‘ended’ the Troubles, the statelet
is subject to renewed national attention. In the wake of the Brexit referendum,
the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the UK snap election which
forged the Conservative-DUP alliance, Northern Ireland is at an impasse.[iii]
However, this roadblock must be lifted since the Irish border is the UK’s only
land boundary with the EU. Discussion about whether this frontier would revert
to a hard border or remain a soft border raises questions about politics and
economics but also, crucially, identity and ideology.[iv]

In April of this year Northern Irish
writers Sean O’Hagan and Glenn Patterson responded to Brexit in The Guardian.[v] A
year on from the referendum, the newspaper also commissioned playwrights to
create a series of ‘Brexit Shorts: Dramas from a Divided Nation’ in June 2017.
These short films explore the ‘drama’ of Brexit from a pan-UK perspective. The
series includes a film by Northern Irish author Stacey Gregg, who ‘moves
between’ London, Dublin, and her hometown of Belfast, ‘enjoy[ing] what she
calls her dual citizenship.’[vi] Gregg’s
short is entitled ‘Your Ma’s a Hard Brexit,’ and it is directed by Amy Hodge of
Headlong Theatre.[vii]
The caption for the film, which is set in Belfast, states: ‘“We know what it
means to be divided.” A mother reflects on Brexit’s consequences for Northern
Ireland.’

The film opens with the series title, ‘Brexit
Shorts: Dramas from a Divided Nation,’ transposed onto a computer-generated ‘map’
of the British and Irish Isles, which are miraculously reconnected after being
separated on TheGuardian’s front page several months earlier. However, the rest of
Europe is nowhere to be seen. It is another curiously neoimperialist ‘map’, which
features design elements that evoke the prior one but in a different way. For
this time, Ireland is de-partitioned. The ‘map’ in the opening credits of the
film renders the islands a uniform shade of grey, with nothing to indicate the existence
of the Irish border or the fact that the Republic is a separate state. The
graphics zoom in on Northern Ireland – still the same shade of grey – then cut
to moving, colour film of the neighbourhood of West Belfast. This transition to
colour film and to the divided site of West Belfast is striking, for it
undercuts the monolithic vision of grey uniformity in the previous ‘map’. And
yet the colour film maintains a wash of greyness courtesy of the ubiquitous
Belfast rain and fog. The camera also pans across the large grey expanse of a
peace wall in West Belfast that separates the Lower Falls Road and the Shankill
Road, traditionally
republican and loyalist communities, respectively.

Peace lines were first constructed by
the British Army during the Troubles and, paradoxically, more were put up after
the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, ostensibly for the ‘protection’ of those who
live along sectarian community borderlines. There are approximately twenty
miles of walls, peace lines, and interfaces in Belfast, a city that is only six
miles across at its widest point. In 2013 Stormont vowed that it would remove
the walls within a decade, by 2023, as part of a new political initiative to
ease sectarian tensions. However, there has not been an active Northern Ireland
Executive since power-sharing collapsed in January 2017, which has caused major
delays for government projects. The Brexit vote further complicates the issue
of removing the peace lines because, as the protagonist of Gregg’s film points
out, the majority of Northern Ireland’s peacebuilding funding comes from the
EU.

The opening of ‘Your Ma’s a Hard Brexit’
establishes Belfast as a place crisscrossed by visible and invisible boundaries
and no-go zones. The panoramic view of West Belfast is transected by a long
stretch of the peace line. The film further disrupts this urban vista with jump
cuts to various sectarian community estates, and it hovers momentarily on shots
of gable ends displaying propagandist murals. The camera lingers on one gable
end whose graffiti have been painted over with a dark shade of grey. They are
still faintly perceptible underneath this greywashing. The Belfast
City Council required many propagandist murals to be painted over after the
Agreement as part of its ‘Re-imaging Communities Programme’, an effort to
de-sectarianise the cityscape.[viii]
Nonetheless, in the film, new scrawls in white spray paint have
appeared on top of this background. They cancel each other out, with the
message ‘U.V.F. 1st BATTALION’ currently holding pride of place. UVF
stands for Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary organisation, and the
graffito indicates that the estate is a loyalist stronghold. This shot features
the grey, graffitied gable end at the centre, framed by a brick wall to the
right and houses to the left, with the camera off-centre, positioned as though
it is peering round the wall to observe the estate’s occupants. This
perspective is evocative of CCTV cameras, remnants of the surveillance culture
which is still prevalent in Belfast. The light grey post of a streetlamp
appears to divide the dark grey gable end in two, with the white graffiti messages
placed on either side. Concrete road barrier poles encircle a woman and her son
within a ring of urban standing stones.

In her directions, Gregg writes: ‘Woman walking with schoolchild, holding their hand. She walks
along the peace-line though we mightn’t notice this straightaway. She is a
Protestant, working-class woman from the area. Her tone is neighbourly,
mischievous, familiar, stoic.’[ix] The unnamed protagonist is played by Northern Irish actor Bronagh
Gallagher. She is on the morning school run with her young son, played by
Thomas Keown. Along the way she regales us with an amusing family anecdote. She
starts, ‘See my daddy. My daddy. He has my head melted. My Craig’s
workin away, right? Skilled labour. Contract work. If ya wanna work, ya have to
go after it. He’s been everywhere, across the water, Isle a’ Man, you name it.
Well. He’s applied for his Irish passport. (Comic grimace) My dad near
blown a fuse. Craig’s gettin an Irish passport!’ The first utterance in the
film begins an impassioned soliloquy about Brexit against the backdrop of the
peace line. It is the physical manifestation of a psychological divide, and as
such it is also evocative of the Irish border. Gregg presents us with
conflicting opinions on Brexit, which are levied by the woman’s monologue. As
she walks and talks, the camera moves to a
closeup of her face, and she speaks animatedly about her family’s mixed
reactions to news of the referendum results.

The film jump cuts to
a high, rusted, silvery metal peace line fence draped in crumpled Union Jack
bunting, then back to the woman, who continues to walk alongside it. She
exclaims, ‘Dad’s eyeballs are out
on stalks: (dad voice) “But […] but you’re British! You’re
Protestant! People didn’t go signin up to the UVF and knockin skulls in for 30
years so your fella could jump teams when he fancied it!’ She continues:

As a prominent MP for the DUP and a son of Reverend Ian
Paisley, Ian Paisley Jr’s use of Twitter to urge his constituents to obtain
Irish passports demonstrates the new platforms and contradictory viewpoints of
the post-Agreement, post-Brexit referendum present.[x] Paisley
Jr is fiercely opposed to republicanism and the idea of a border poll. However,
he states on Twitter, ‘My advice is if you are
entitled to second passport then take one. I sign off lots of applications for
constituents…My advice is to take as many as you can especially if you travel
to different world trouble zones.’[xi]
As Gregg recognises, this statement is ironic given that Northern Ireland has
long been a ‘trouble zone’, and obtaining an Irish passport is a legal act of
claiming an Irish identity. This mention of Paisley Jr in the woman’s monologue
juxtaposes the perceptions of father and son (the Paisleys) and father and
daughter (Gregg’s characters), thereby illustrating generational shifts in
outlook towards Northern Irish self-identification.

The film’s director Hodge cross-cuts the
woman’s speech with a barrage of shots: tattered Union Jack and Ulster flags; a
faded homemade sign taped to a window with the slogan ‘PROUD TO BE BRITISH’; a
gable end on Crimea Street bearing messages from ‘ULSTER TO ENGLAND’; an
enormous mural on the Shankill marking the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth
II, who reigns over a bus stop covered by a KFC advert; another mural at
Hopewell Crescent off the Crumlin Road depicting children standing amidst the
rubble of the ‘SUMMER OF ‘69’. Sign upon sign upon sign. This plethora of signifiers
is constitutive of the city’s sectarian geography, which is embedded in its
otherwise grey visual landscape and which often provides its only source of
colour in the film.

The woman explains that she works on
‘the Interface Project – the Interface is along the peace-line here, between
communities,’ and affirms that she and ‘the ones at work are all remain.’ She
pauses for a quiet moment of reflection, then states, ‘Like, we know what it
means to be divided. We’re not too bad at that ourselves! But sure, it can’t be
half the country’s wrong, can it?’ As she makes this remark, she passes by
a mural commemorating the Battle of the Somme, which bears a fresh wreath of
fabric poppies. Across the street, adolescent boys who should be on their way
to school play unsupervised on a stretch of waste ground. It is littered with
trash and surrounded by boarded up, graffitied buildings and another tall stretch
of the peace line. The boys appear to be hemmed in by the built environment and
its palimpsestic history of conflict. As the woman and her son walk to school, it
becomes apparent that all of Belfast is enmatrixed within its politically
charged cityscape. The implicit question here, as in much of Gregg’s work, is
what the future holds for the children who are raised in this setting.

The
camera returns to the woman, who resumes the story about her husband. She
states, ‘Craig was sayin about the border. I’m sorry, I can see that’s not
gonna work out well. Sure, Lord so and so from Westminster can say nothing’s
gonna change, but see once that’s the only land border for immigration and
terrorists, I can’t see them sittin on their hands, do you?’ The camera zooms
in on her face and she asks the viewer directly, ‘I remember the border, do
you? Wasn’t much craic. Here’s us just getting on with the south.’ This closeup
shot and her shift to the first-person pronoun ‘I’ indicate that the latter question
is her own, rather than Craig’s. She continues, ‘They say themens in
Westminster never think about us ones over here, and I used to think sure that
can’t be true, it must just be that they don’t understand; sure they’re never
over here. Ah, they’ll stick a few checkpoints on that border and next thing
you know we’ll have a referendum for a united Ireland […] then everyone in
Northern Ireland’ll be Irish.’ Although she delivers this last statement as a
joke, it illustrates effectively the malleability and arbitrariness of borders,
whether they are geopolitical, identitarian, or both.

Much of Gregg’s oeuvre examines the
dynamic of ‘themens and usens,’ a binary which is applied frequently to
Northern Irish society but which has universal resonance. In the script, Gregg
writes, ‘Zoom out to reveal the interface barrier, looming above them
and stretching off into the distance.’ She recognises that the term ‘interface
barrier’ is oxymoronic, and in the film she explores the ambiguities of ‘peacekeeping’
discourse and infrastructure. The peace line is both a barrier to keep people
from crossing over to the ‘other side’ and an interface – it has openings that
are spaces with the potential for intercommunal connection. The woman
concludes, ‘At the end of the day, if you’ve your head screwed on,
get your Irish passport: you’re European and you’re British. Go after the work.
And sure, that’s the best the young ones can hope for, isn’t it?’ Gregg
finishes the script with the direction, ‘Out
on the child,’ and the film ends with a closeup of the boy as he continues
to walk along the peace line. In her short
film Gregg charts an alternate, claustrophobic ‘map’ of Northern Irish
spatial and cultural geography, and traces how identity functions as a performative response to this environment.

In his review of the series, Toby
Young, associate editor of the right-wing, pro-Brexit UK magazine The Spectator, declares that ‘The
Writers of the Guardian’s “Brexit
Shorts” Have Swallowed Project Fear.’[xii]
He remarks of Gregg’s short, ‘It’s not a
fully-fledged drama — more a piece of agitprop. And it makes the same point
over and over again, namely, that if the UK leaves the European Union there
will inevitably be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.’[xiii]
Young cites ‘the need to preserve the soft border’ as ‘a priority of both sides
in the Brexit negotiations,’ which was ‘confirmed by David Davis and Michel
Barnier on the first day of talks.’[xiv]
Tellingly, Young bases his assessment of Gregg’s film on reports made by Davis,
the Conservative MP and Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and the
French politician Barnier, European Chief Negotiator for Brexit, ‘on the first
day of talks.’ This is a thoughtless statement given that Brexit negotiations
have proven to be drastically changeful since the referendum results were
revealed in June 2016. Furthermore, although Gregg’s film is a monologue, it is
not one-sided. It conveys the voices of the woman, her husband, and her father.
Significantly, her son does not have any dialogue; he does not have a political
voice because he is too young to understand the situation. The only utterance
that children make in the film is laughter, a narrative device which highlights
their innocence.

Gregg
and Hodge explore the paradoxical nature of Northern Irish society via
filmmaking techniques such as juxtaposing imagery, intercutting dialogue with an
onslaught of visual signs, and by portraying different forms of greywashing. The
grey visual tones within the film include the city’s atmosphere itself, for it
is constantly overcast; the vast grey span of the peace line; and the City
Council’s efforts to paint over Belfast’s sectarian graffiti with an
ineffective grey coating. This short film portrays the city of Belfast as a small
grey area that is circumscribed by increasingly larger ones: ‘Northern
Ireland’, ‘Britain’, ‘the United Kingdom’, and ‘Europe’. These concepts
function as floating signs within the film, much like its title. ‘Your ma’s a hard
Brexit’ is framed as an insult that one child would shout at another, without
knowing what a ‘hard Brexit’ means. The irony here is that no one, including the
adults, knows what a ‘hard Brexit’ means because it has never happened before.
The closing credits of the film state:
‘THE GUARDIAN: THE WHOLE PICTURE’. However, the conflictive cartographies of
the newspaper’s front-page jigsaw puzzle, the graphic ‘map’ of the British and
Irish Isles in the series’ opening credits, and the sectarian geography of West
Belfast in the film exemplify the fact that viewers never get the whole
picture. As Gregg and Hodge indicate, we only get part of it, and it is washed
in shades of grey.

[iii]
DUP stands for Democratic Unionist Party, a right-wing, Eurosceptic party that
currently has the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly. The DUP has
strong links to the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, founded by Ian Paisley,
as well as historical ties to loyalist paramilitary groups.

Dr Dawn Miranda
Sherratt-Bado is an academic and a dual specialist in Irish and Caribbean
Studies. She is co-editor of Female
Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland (New Island Books, 2017).
She is author of Decoloniality and Gender in Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle
Pineau: Connective Caribbean Readings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Dawn has also published in Irish Studies Review, Breac, Dublin Review of Books, Callaloo,
The Irish Times, and the Sunday Business Post.